29 December 2018 11:07 AM

THE best article I have read over the festive season to date was in The Sunday Times on December 23. Written by Niall Ferguson, it was entitled "Merry Xmas Everybody - it's 1973 all over again". Drawing some clear parallels (Trump scandals/Watergate, political turmoil in Britain then and now, Xi Jinping re-inventing the autocratic Chinese Communist Party of Chairman Mao), he added: "My friends, it's 1973. Manchester United have sacked their manager. Liverpool are going to win the Premier League. Their star striker, Mohamed Salah, has hair that Kevin Keegan must wish he still had."

I think he's right.

If so, next year is 1974, with a constitutional crisis and two general elections. Can't wait. In 1974, it was said striking miners were defying the democratic majority. This time round, it is the political class, determined to water down or stop Brexit.

We are in, I fear, for a very rocky ride.

Elsewhere, a very sad piece of news from earlier in the year that I had managed to miss. Twenty years ago, I was on a panel at Goldsmiths College, London. A fellow panellist was Nyta Mann, of the New Statesman. Like me, she had just published a (co-authored) book about New Labour.

There was no money to pay panellists, but there was a drinks fund that bankrolled a boozy, post-panel lunch in a local pub, and there was taxi money available. Nyta and I made free with the Goldsmiths beer cash and went on to put our taxi money behind the bar. My last memory is of this very funny, ultra-bright and engaging young woman tottering off in to the afternoon (I tottered in a different direction).

From yesterday's edition of the Daily Mail, I learned she had been suffering from multiple sclerosis and had died in an assisted-suicide clinic in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, I have been idly figuring out my favourite aspects of Christmas-New Year. Let's start with the very best day out of all 365 of them, Christmas Eve. On to Boxing Day, cold cuts, strong drink and lots of reading. New Year's Day (not Eve) is a great time for a big lunch and a walk. The night of December 25 is my cue for putting on a long, enjoyable film - Murder on the Orient Express (1974) is a favourite. Finally, there is January 6, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, the Epiphany, Feast of the Three Kings.

Oh, and my wedding anniversary.

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

22 December 2018 11:53 AM

FOR, I imagine, the same reasons as everyone else, I'm in a tearing hurry and sign off with just a few observations.

One, did David Dimbleby let the cat out of the bag on Today this morning, when he took issue with those who believe private-sector broadcasters are better than the BBC because they can be "freer and more opinionated"? More opinionated? Bit of a giveaway, old son.

Two, the Rev Lucy Winkett, rector of St James's Church in Piccadilly, writes in a generally excellent Christmas special issue of the New Statesman. She notes: "Whatever your position on Brexit (I voted Remain)..." Stop right there. You voted Remain? Wow, I mean that is unbelievable. A central London cleric actually didn't vote Leave! The shock's too much. Nurse, quickly! My pills are in in the bathroom...

In the same edition, Andrew Marr thinks vegans are on the winning side of history. Just like all those people who wanted Britain to join the euro...

Three, do you think 2019 could be the year speakers of British English revert to saying "out of bounds" rather than "off limits"? No, I don't think so either.

Four, am I alone in taking a sort of perverse pleasure in such egregious examples of the uselessness of the British State as the Gatwick drone affair, the news that Crossrail is hopelessly over-budget, ditto HS2, the collapse of Army recruitment, the pitiful police clear-up rate and the explosion in the number of first-class degrees awarded by our (State) universities?

Maybe. It could be some sort of personal moral or mental failing. As a wickedly-humorous newsdesk chief used to say whenever I or any other reporter screwed up in a big way: "This Christmas, remember him and others suffering this tragic condition..."

Thanks again for reading and Merry Christmas.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press

15 December 2018 10:00 AM

FOR anyone bewildered by the pig’s ear that Britain’s political and bureaucratic classes are making of Brexit, a possible explanation suggests itself.

There is nothing new in suggesting that it is all deliberate, that Britain’s not-very-elite elite is deliberately screwing up in the hope either of achieving a “Brexit in name only” or of derailing it altogether.

But I haven’t seen anyone raise the possibility that they are doing so because they are bound to.

Twenty years ago, in our first book, The Age of Insecurity (Verso), Larry Elliott and I suggested there may be secret protocols attached to the Rome Treaty (which created the European Community), possibly replicated in the Maastricht Treaty, which turned the EC into the European Union.

We weren’t engaged in some wild, conspiracy-theory speculation. Rather, we made the suggestion because such protocols were known to be attached to the Atlantic Treaty, the founding document of NATO.

In 1991, author Philip Willan published Puppetmasters (Constable), a study of the subversion of Italy by its own secret state. The protocols attached to the treaty and signed by Italy required the Rome elite to keep the Communist Party out of power and to guarantee Italy’s “international alignment within the western bloc by any means, even if the electorate were to show a different inclination”.

Two years ago, our own electorate showed “a different inclination”, and the rest you know. Time is short to forget UKIP, the European Research Group and the rest and create a militant June 23 Movement, with the sole objective of defending the referendum result against its many enemies, domestic and foreign.

One of its first tasks will be to identify districts and regions that voted for Leave overwhelmingly and arrange for them to declare their own exits from the EU on March 29, regardless of what the Remain-dominated Parliament tries to do in terms of extending the withdrawal period.

Wanted: a free media

WHEN is someone going to tell the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to get stuffed? Yesterday’s edition of The Guardian informed us: “Under…new rules British companies will no longer be able to create promotions that depict men and women engaged in gender stereotypical activities, amid fears that such depictions are contributing to gender pay inequality and causing mental harm.”

Have you ever heard such worthless cow-cake? Or, indeed, a more pitiful rationale for censorship?

The paper added: “The new rules will cover adverts in newspapers, magazines, on television, in cinema, on leaflets and on the internet.” It did, however, mention that the “authority” operates “a system of self-regulation”, in other words it has no actual authority and no-one has to pay any attention to anything it says.

What I want for Christmas is a new press or internet (or both) media group that declares itself unregulated by the ASA, the Independent Press Standards Organisation, Impress, Ofcom or anything other than the law of the land.

We no more need regulatory bodies for journalists or advertisers than we do for novelists or historians.

Saturday miscellany

I have written about Clare Francis’s 1985 novel Red Crystal (William Heinemann) as a rear-view review for the Lion & Unicorn site (proudly unregulated by any of the abovementioned self-appointed busybodies) here. It tells the tale of a home-grown British terrorist group, loosely based on the Angry Brigade of the late Sixties and early Seventies. Such groups, having no concrete objectives (unlikely ETA in Spain or the IRA in the UK) cannot be negotiated with, given the overthrow of western society is not something conventional politicians either can or would concede. But neither can such groups win, which may explain why (spoiler alert) a key objective of this outfit, as with real-life terrorist organisations, is simply to have its jailed members let out of prison. In October 1977, a Lufthansa airliner was hijacked and flown to Mogadishu in Somalia in order to secure the release from prison in Germany of members of the Baader-Meinhof Group. German special forces stormed the plane and rescued the hostages. The three terrorists in the German slammer, presumably learning that they would not now be released, killed themselves. As the great Roy Wood said on learning of the death of his manager-turned-adversary Don Arden, I seem to have lost Interflora’s phone number.

WHY do BBC hacks (and others) insist on referring to the fallen Hollywood mogul as Harvey “Weinsteen”, not “Weinstine”? German-derived names take the second vowel sound, not the first. No-one talks about the film maker Steven “Spileberg”, do they? Elsewhere, our envy-of-the-world State broadcaster ran an item on its website on December 10 with the headline: "Why women have less power than you think." Really? Exactly how much power do I think they have, then?

City AM, the Monday to Friday financial paper, is, alas, not what it was, certainly in terms of commentary. True, the excellent Paul Omerod and Elena Shalneva still grace its pages, but the ever-enlightening John Hulsman has departed and there is a flaccidity that wasn’t there before. Too many columns have been penned either by people running vaporous “consultancies” or chairing “task forces” and other talking shops. Their headlines have the merit of telling you that there’s no need to read the rest of the piece, usually variations on “why it’s time to get real on workplace diversity/pay transparency/employee engagement/gender equality”. Once a must-read, it is no more.

A last word on the Mogadishu rescue. Members of the Special Air Service accompanied German forces and, as a thank you, Germany arranged for Britain to house the Joint European Torus (JET) facility, researching nuclear fusion energy. It’s still there, in Oxfordshire. Attempts to generate sustainable energy supplies from fusion have always failed, but the boffins solider on. Next time we help with a rescue, maybe Britain will be chosen as the site for a European alchemy project.

08 December 2018 10:30 AM

ON July 5 2014, I wrote here of having recently enjoyed an agreeably liquid lunch in a pub in Liverpool while perusing a most erudite column by Professor Tim Congdon in Standpoint magazine.

He noted: “[S]upply and demand operate in the market for boom-bust cycles, as in all markets. The inevitable result of the profitability of boom-bust forecasting is that far more boom-bust cycles are forecast than actually occur.”

In a similar way, we are currently in the middle of a flurry of predictions that the next recession is just round the corner. Now, I have no idea if that is true or not, but there does seem to be some confusion as to why such a downturn will come about.

On the one hand, we are told that one is “due”, because Britain and the US have experienced continuous growth since 2009 and all good things come to an end. It should be borne in mind that the euro-zone has not enjoyed growth over that period – I did a week on the Daily Mail in August 2013, and wrote up the final return to expansion of the single currency area.

Quite separately, assorted “triggers” are touted about as the likely causes of a new recession: a trade war, oil-price turbulence, clashes between Brussels and countries such as Italy that refuse to toe the line on budgets, or something to do with Russia.

Logic would seem to dictate that something that is due does not need a trigger. Won’t it just happen anyway?

Maybe two types of downturns are being confused. One would be a manifestation of the routine operation of the business cycle, in which case talk of one being “due” would make some sense.

The other would be a recession created by a crisis or crises that have little or nothing to do with the business cycle.

A real danger is that recent events have blurred the lines between the two types of recessions. If ultra-loose monetary policy has artificially delayed the “down” phase of the business cycle, then the recession, when it comes, may well be more severe than would otherwise have been the case.

Should such a downswing collide with a recession-inducing crisis event, then we could be in real trouble, especially as national governments used up a huge amount of fiscal firepower fighting the Great Recession and may well prove to be out of ammunition.

A big share sell-off seemed under way on both sides of the Atlantic this week. Could that be telling us something? Possibly, but always remember the wise words of Paul Samuelson, the Nobel Prize winning economist: “The stock market has forecast nine of the last five recessions.”

The passage of time

HEADING down the Strand midday on Monday and realising I was early for lunch, I ducked into Bull Inn Court and entered the delightful Nell Gwynne Tavern for a quick drink. The music system was playing Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), a 1983 ditty from The Eurythmics.

“That’s funny,” I said.

“What is chief?” asked the barman.

“I was in here on Christmas Eve 1984, and I’m pretty sure that was playing then.”

Quick as a flash, the barmaid declared; “I wasn’t working here then.” Well, no. Not only was she almost certainly not born, but there is every chance her parents had yet to reach primary-school age.

Meanwhile, I have been tidying up my work history in order to look merely middle aged rather than ancient. Back in 1990, when I started work at The Guardian, I liked to say I had been in the business for ten years.

Which was true, if you counted six months at training school followed by two and a half years as a fairly useless junior reporter.

Using that basis of calculation today, I would have spent a terrifying 32 years in journalism. So instead I disregard those first three years and the further two that I spent as a regional business correspondent, on the ground that I count only time spent in national media.

But that still leaves 27 years on the clock, so I redefine my career once more as time spent in national newspapers, lopping off my five years at a wire service.

Twenty-two years! Much more like it.

Saturday miscellany

MANY years ago, I read an article in (I think) The Times in which the writer hailed the benefits of giving up smoking not so much in terms of health but in terms of having several more hours in the day to play with. When I packed it in 16 years ago, I didn’t really have the same experience, but have found that giving up Radio 4 really does free up time for more productive activities. OK, I haven’t entirely given up, but From Our Own Correspondent, Loose Ends and I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue make up the equivalent of the odd cigar at Christmas after a 40-a-day habit.

I’m sorry to say that the one-time home of erudition and wit has become the purveyor of modish pap and ideological slurry. The kindly, learned and occasionally-mischievous schoolteacher has been replaced by an assistant lecturer in social justice studies at a former polytechnic.

Catching snatches from Today this week confirmed, to me, the wisdom of my decision. On Thursday, a woman was explaining that inappropriate attitudes among jurors needed to be tackled in order to get more rape convictions (or something like that) while on Friday we were told, in back-to-back news reports, that Oxbridge is full of kids from good schools (no kidding?) and that ethnic minority academics are (supposedly) paid less than their white equivalents.

Count me out.

THE “grocer’s apostrophe” has long been the butt of jokes (“Potatoe’s 75p/lb”) and so on. But in terms of grammatical challenges, our railway companies leave the shopkeepers cold. Here are some examples: “Due to heavy rain, platforms may be slippery” (“Due to” means “caused by”, and no-one would say “Caused by heavy rain, platforms may be slippery”. Apart from anything else, platforms are not caused by heavy rain). “Please remember to take all your personal belongings with you” (As opposed, presumably, to taking all of somebody else’s belongings?). “Stay behind the yellow line for your own personal safety.” (Neither “own” or “personal” is needed here – “your” has it covered)

MY Monday Strand lunch occurred on a ridiculously mild day, given it was December 3. Surely, we could have something just a little more seasonal? The next day, the countryside down our way was covered in frost and my morning walk across London Bridge was bitter. Be careful what you wish for.

01 December 2018 11:43 AM

SOME years ago, when I worked as an economics correspondent for a Sunday paper, I made a routine call to the Treasury press office to ask if it could give me something for the weekend (narf, narf).

Indeed it could. The then Chancellor wanted to crack down on offshore havens.

This, I pointed out, was hardly news. It would be far more of a story were he to speak in favour of tax havens.

Not tax havens, came the reply, but “regulatory havens”. There was some overlap between the two, but they were quite distinct.

Here at home, it tends to be assumed that the “hidden economy” (aka shadow or black economy) is primarily a matter of tax evasion. There is plenty of that, no doubt, but we hear a lot less about regulatory evasion.

On November 17, I suggested that much of tomorrow’s pub trade may go underground, with informal watering holes in private houses, describing themselves as wine clubs or beer appreciation societies. I stand by that but believe the application of this idea could be much wider – may, in fact, already be so.

Pop-up restaurants are an established idea, but the ones we know about are in visible locations such as empty shops. How many are either in the homes of the “restaurateurs” or in the houses of the customers?

Bed and breakfast accommodation, once treated as a private arrangement between householder and guest, has been lumbered with much the same sort of regulation as is applied to hotels. I wonder how much informal B&B activity is taking place, perhaps through discreet web networks.

Live music, theatrical performances, even art exhibitions are increasingly caught in the jaws of regulation on the one hand and crippling insurance costs on the other. I would not be surprised to learn of a thriving, unregulated informal scene in these and other activities.

And should Jeremy Corbyn be elected to office and introduce the media-regulation proposals of Lord Leveson, then expect a lively underground press to spring up.

Saturday miscellany

ON November 10, I suggested that companies should be run by people who had practised the activity in which the firm was involved: bakeries should be run by bakers, car firms by engineers and so on. I said: “The notion of ‘management’ as a profession in its own right is a long-running con and one that is well overdue for exposure.”

How good to have some heavyweight support for this view. In the November 22 edition of the London Review of Books, Neil Ascherson reviews What We Have Lost: The Dismantling of Great Britain, by James Hamilton-Paterson. Ascherson writes: “Later in his book, he attacks the notion (‘holy writ today’) that a college degree in management enrols one in a portable profession in which it hardly matters what a company does. ‘Current wisdom apparently sees no difference between managing a company that makes marmalade and managing Network Rail’.”

ELSEWHERE, the “arts” programme Front Row went beyond parody on November 28, when a film director was praised thus: “He’s almost cornered the market in strong women. He’s a director with a queer sensibility.” What can we learn from this, comrades?

FROM the front line of our so-sorely-oppressed licensed trade, a much-liked pub in Westminster was closed to drinkers at lunchtime, the "explanation" being that "we open at four today", as if this were the most natural thing in the world. Home boozing from now on.

I had been attending an excellent event on the subject of Europe which, being private, must stay that way. But one contributor repeated a line he has used in public before, so here it is. Tony Benn and others took the view, in the Seventies and after, that the European Community/European Union would be a bosses' club, undemocratic, deflationary, and would put the interests of bankers ahead of those or ordinary people. "And guess what? They were absolutely right."

Thanks again for reading and enjoy the weekend.

dan.atkinson@live.co.uk

Europe Didn't Work, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson is published by Yale University Press